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Clerc Scar 5.930 July 2009
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All done by a deaf artist/cartoonist--Matt Daigle
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Editor's Note: Readers are invited to suggest a thing, person, place, event, or concept for Raymond Luczak to write about. You can suggest anything up to three words and send it to editor@clercscar.com and Raymond will pick one to respond to each week. Thank you, Karen Christie, for suggesting "Peak Experience"! When I was younger during the 1970s, I lived for the Gogebic County Fair held every second weekend of August. None of us could wait to go there right after Dad came home from work that Thursday, so all of nine children and our mother piled into his mauve Pontiac station wagon. Dusk was approaching, a siren already calling her children of summer to autumn's impending curfew. We didn't care. We knew that a cacophony of blinking colored lights and a symphony of screams and pulsating music awaited our eyes and ears. Held at the far edge of Ironwood, Michigan, the fairgrounds were wedged next to the border of Wisconsin. Even from the distance we could see the swaying seats of the Ferris wheel aching to rotate upward one more notch, and the soft explosion of colored lights below the wheel. Our excitement was impossible to contain in that station wagon. Once Dad was able to find a parking space, we flocked ahead to the pair of admission booths. I no longer remember how much it cost to get us in, but my father was proud that all of us were there with him and our mother, especially if it was our neighbor Mrs. Lewinski manning the booth. She asked Dad, "How many?" I never saw what he said, but he probably said something like, "Two adults and nine kids." After we slipped through the gate, Dad gave us money for the rides or whatever we wanted to do. This was a big deal because our weekly allowance was so small to begin with; I think we each got only fifty cents a week. We never thought of ourselves as poor, but we knew that some of our classmates had more money than we did. With money in hand, we paired up in small groups and took off. I lingered behind with my younger sister Andra and my brother Kevin. Mom and Dad held their hands. They walked slowly to the white and green barns where the stench of manure and hay hit our nostrils. Still, I wanted to see how the cows and horses swatted at flies with their tails. They did this nonstop; it was as if their tails had their own brains. Most of them seemed annoyed with the strangers who filed through the aisles and kept their faces away from us. But I didn't have much patience for the 4-H animals. I wanted to go out to the main grounds and check out the rides. Every year, they were pretty much the same: Tilt-a-Whirl, Scrambler, and other rides which names I no longer recall. My sister Andra and I rode together on these rides. My oldest sister Jean loved braiding her blond trusses; she was a beautiful girl who often wore the color red. Andra and I played together a lot in the yard since Kevin was still so young. He usually tagged after us, especially when our older siblings began to break gradually from us. We were too young to run around the neighborhood by ourselves. Our world consisted of the woods across the street, our wide yards, and the vast playground at Norrie School a few blocks away. Andra was three years younger than me. She was always the one who'd instinctively understood that I needed help around the dinner table when it seemed like a room of babble from kids vying for attention. She pointed out who was talking, and sometimes she mouthed to me what was being said. She usually sat across from me, next to Jean. Then she met her new best friend Julie a few blocks southwest of us. Andra soon developed what I thought was a strange, fake laugh. She worried more about what she was wearing. She didn't seem all that interested in helping me follow the conversation around the dinner table. I didn't quite understand what had happened or why, but I knew that Julie deserved to be hated. Maybe Andra had begun to see me through Julie's eyes. Having a deaf brother was strange and uncool. I will never know for sure, but the damage was done. She rarely talked to me again. Still, in my memories of the Gogebic County Fair, Julie hadn't happened, and if she had, I never sensed her presence in Andra when we went on those rides. It was as if we were close as before. Children have a way of not caring that far into the future, or never dwelling on memories that would make adulthood a darker time of contemplation and regret. It was all about right now, right in this moment, so here we were, watching a gruffy sweat-beaded unshaven man with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth wobble the security latch in front of our feet and then turning the ignition key for the first slow turn around the thick pole that held us a few feet off the trampled grass. In the short distance of shadows and flashing lights outside the fence that encircled us on the Scrambler, we could see Mom and Dad waving to us. Sometimes they stood next to friends they knew, or talked with customers that Dad knew from working the meat counter at Lopez's IGA off the highway. Dad was always pointing us out to people he knew. His wallet was thick with our latest school pictures, ready to be flashed to anyone who asked. The Scrambler was a ride that spun around a pole, but in such a way that we were spun around invisible corners so we were constantly squished together at these points. In between these sharp corners, we would separate and try to ignore the pain from the jabs of elbows and shoulders pushed against each other if one of us were on the wrong end. I didn't mind, actually, because it was a physical closeness that I rarely got, more so when we grew older and distant. Once our spinning reached a crescendo of speed, our screaming and laughing and giggling hit a careless pitch. Our hands slid back and forth across the smooth metal bar in front of us. We stumbled out, full of giddiness and giggles. The Tilt-a-Whirl was better. We sat in a half-shell that spun around in circles at crazy angles as the half-shells groaned around a fat pole of blinking lights. The spinning was always staccato, a marriage of gravity and machinery, so we never knew when we'd spin 360 degrees, or 180 degrees swaying and waiting for the next shift in angle for the reward of a full 360-degree spin. Sometimes we got a 720-degree spin. That nearly gave me a headache, but what a rush! We couldn't stop laughing and smiling. Things were all right again. Since then I have gone on numerous, and far more extreme, rides around the country at places like Cedar Point, Six Flags, and Valleyfair, but nothing can match the innocent exhilaration of letting go, welcoming the arms of gravity and allowing the endless screaming of delight and fear to begin all over again. There is truly nothing like the world we experience unchecked with our younger selves, not yet understanding how shallowness can encroach what used to be a closeness with someone you love. Nothing.
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Raymond's Web site is at http://www.raymondluczak.com.
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